Renewal, promise, liberation. Not exactly the primary emphasis of my childhood Sunday school classes. But in Haught’s theological reading of scripture, these words are essential. Indeed, if one rejects the scientific metaphysics that tells us that evolution is empty of meaning, a blind and random affair, one begins, according to Haught, to see hints of a telos or direction in the universe and, in that direction, a promise. It is a promise that what happens in this world has the potential to make a difference not just in the affairs of society today but in the larger development of consciousness and spirit in the universe itself. For Haught the Christian story is ultimately a story of the future, a subtle spiritual whisper that calls out to us from both the depth of biblical revelation and the heart of the cosmos itself, suggesting that what goes on in this world may be connected in some small way to the evolutionary destiny of the universe.

It didn’t take me very long in the conversation to realize that Haught takes the theos part of his theology very seriously. God is important to him, and he uses the term freely, forthrightly even. He expressed his disappointment with other evolutionary philosophers who are willing to talk about the immanent divinity in nature but shy away from talk of God and the transcendence that such a word implies. But he also made it clear several times that there is nothing old-fashioned about what he means when he uses this ancient term.

“In the modern world, we feel the tension between two religious vectors or two poles,” he explained to me. “One is the traditional withdrawal from the world—the desire to find peace in some Platonic heaven up there or in some sort of mystical present or some eternal now. Then there’s another pole that comes from being part of a modern world in which political and scientific revolutions have taken place. There is beginning to emerge a feeling that this world—I mean the whole universe, both cosmos and culture—is going somewhere. There is a drama that is unfolding before our eyes, and we wonder if we shouldn’t be part of that. Teilhard set out to try to find some resolution between these two poles. He saw that there is communion with God and then there’s communion with the earth. But there’s also communion with God through the earth. He resolved the tension by rediscovering the biblical idea that God is not up above but rather up ahead. In other words, everything that happens in the universe is anticipatory. The world rests on the future. And one could say that God is the one who has future in His very essence.”

At this point, we were nearing the end of our conversation, and I had one last question, potentially the most delicate and controversial of the day. I knew from Haught’s writings that his understanding of God was nuanced and complex, but I also knew that he had strong feelings about the need to maintain the idea of a personal God. Now when you move in progressive spiritual circles heavily influenced by Buddhism, you get used to a certain reticence around that notion, if not downright hostility. Sometimes it’s the patriarchal associations, as in God, the Father; sometimes it’s the anthropomorphism, as in God, the old man in the sky. And sometimes it’s simply confusion about how to relate to a phrase so loaded with cultural overlays and subject to misunderstanding. In a sense, God is the ultimate Rorschach test, and how we interpret him, her, or it says everything about how we ultimately understand our experience of life and reality. Of course, a personal God is an essential part of Catholic doctrine, but I still found it difficult to understand what could be gained by holding firm to what seemed like an outdated notion.

“We do tend to be anthropomorphic, and therefore there’s always a danger of emphasizing the personality of God to the point of idolatry, if you will, of diminishing the infinity, the transcendence, so as to make it somehow manageable,” he acknowledged, pausing for a moment of contemplation before continuing. “Now in our own ordinary experience of the world, the experiences that are most impressive, most challenging, most exciting are of another person, a ‘thou,’ a subject. So to me, the problem with denying the personality of ultimate reality is that if God is somehow impersonal, nonpersonal, if ultimate reality lacks ‘thou-ness,’ then it is somehow less intense in being than I am. And I wonder if I can surrender the completeness of my being to what I take to be impersonal or nonpersonal. I do believe in the importance of neuter language about God, and this is why I follow theologians who refer to God as mystery. God is depth, the inexhaustible depth dimension. God is infinite beauty. God is infinite goodness. So when I use the term ‘personal,’ I’m not using it in the anthropomorphic sense of the one-planet deity that our scientific consciousness has outgrown. But if I subtract the mystery of subjectivity from being altogether, I’m left surrendering myself to something that lacks what I consider to be the most impressive type of experience that we can have in our worldly existence, and that’s the experience of another person. So God is at least personal. God is also more than personal. God is this infinite, inexhaustible depth dimension. And even if this depth expands to the multiverse, and even if I have a vision of reality that includes trillions and trillions of worlds, if at the core of that reality I don’t sense the pulse of personality, then in some sense that whole of totality is less intense in being than I am. And I don’t believe that.”

Later in the day, as I inched my way forward in traffic amid the busy hustle and bustle of summer beachgoers and vacationers on Long island, I had time to reflect upon my conversations with Haught. It was hard not to be struck by the contemplative atmosphere of the retreat center and the way we spoke so frankly together about matters of spirit, God, and faith. Haught was everything I thought he would be—a deeply Christian man with an inspired vision of the religious life, and someone who has much to offer the conversation about evolution and spirituality that is taking place largely outside the context of Christianity. He has found a sweet spot in his theology, one that bridges old and new, and he has managed to become both a defender of his own tradition and an advocate of ideas that are far ahead of even its more progressive factions. In Haught one can almost feel the Christian canon undergoing a deep evolution, one that might not become visible in the everyday life of the Church for decades but which will inevitably have a huge impact on its future.

“The world must have a God; but our concept of God must be extended as the dimensions of our world are extended,” wrote Teilhard almost a century ago. In the early twentieth century, evolution had changed everything, he noted. And he predicted that only those religions would survive that were willing to develop forms of their traditions that organically embrace the reality of an evolutionary worldview. After my time with Haught, I think I began to better understand the clarity of Teilhard’s foresight. Indeed, just as a God that lives in and through nature might have been the most relevant form of divinity to a hunter-gatherer tribe embedded in the cycles of the natural world thousands of years ago, and just as a transcendent God who offers infinite peace, rest, and restoration beyond time and the world might have made perfect sense for the “nasty, brutish, and short” lives of our early Christian forefathers, so, too, does this new conception of God fit hand in glove with the fast-changing, globalizing, rapidly complexifying world of our own time. The consciousness of our age calls out for a God principle that lives not just in the wondrous beauty of nature, or the eternal stillness of the present moment, but in the unknown creative potential that exists in the mysterious space of the future. It is in contemplating such a God that one can begin to intimate Haught’s “spirit of renewal.” And it is there that we can begin to find the intellectual, moral, and ultimately religious inspiration to embrace the great challenge of an evolutionary worldview—taking the burden of the future on our own shoulders. Perhaps along the way, we might just detect a hint of the same impulse that took a young boy in rural Virginia all the way from the corridors of the medieval world to the edges of the far distant future, sustained by both a radical spirit of renewal and the revealed words of an ancient God.